The stories under the tree. We all have a secret memory of the holidays from when we were children. Here is for you one of the stories of our editorial staff taken from the December issue. Do you also feel the Christmas scent that rises from Abruzzo?
When I was a child, and for a long time even as an adult, a package full of goodness arrived every year at Christmas. It was my grandmother from Teramo who sent him. As always, she prepared sweets for children and grandchildren, near and far. We spent Christmas with her a few times, due to the distance and my father's work that often kept him busy even during the holidays. But those packages brought the particular aromas of another gastronomic world into our home, in addition to the skill and love of our grandmother.
So here for me, a Milanese, Christmas curiously does not smell of panettone, but it tastes like cagionetti, those fried ravioli, stuffed with a sweet dough with chestnuts and must, or with the crunchy that my grandmother cut into small irregular rhombuses and placed on bay leaves, instead of on wafers. I could never get them off completely, and I ended up eating a few fragments of leaves, so that mixed taste of caramel, almonds and bay leaves is a terrific madeleine for me.
There was also no shortage of L’Aquila nougats, of various types, in their colorful packaging. We went on for days enjoying them after dinner, even when the fresh treats in the package were finished. Everyone liked them, but I shared the passion especially with my mother, even though she preferred the white nougat covered with dark chocolate, while I was crazy for the soft one with the chocolate dough.
Never as this year are we encouraged to recover a truer meaning even for Christmas. Hoping to be able to get together, at least as a family, I would like a rambling lunch without rules, a menu where all obligations are skipped and only the flavors of the heart remain, which in the end are always the ones that nourish the most, and for longer.
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